


No Kind of Atmosphere

by Fionavar



Category: Dungeons & Dragons (Roleplaying Game), Red Dwarf
Genre: Crack, Crossover, Gen, Lots of Smegging Silliness, and occasional feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-17
Updated: 2018-08-17
Packaged: 2019-06-28 05:35:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,692
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15700857
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fionavar/pseuds/Fionavar
Summary: It's cold outside, there's no kind of atmosphereI'm all alone, more or less...Taliesin Harper is making his slow way home on the Jupiter Mining Corps ship Red Dwarf. He has a pet cat, the friendship of an Awesome and Powerful Supercomputer, and a very unpleasant coworker. Things, unsurprisingly, get worse.





	No Kind of Atmosphere

**Author's Note:**

  * For [onemooncircles](https://archiveofourown.org/users/onemooncircles/gifts).



> Happy birthday, Dungeon Master Moonwitch!

He was not the kind of man, Taliesin Harper reflected as a black cat purred on his lap, for whom plans worked. It was not the first time he had thought this, or its more usual variant: he was the kind of man who inevitably fucked it up. In a very short time, he’d gone from a comfortable berth on _Star Shark_ to… well, he didn’t really have a title on _Red Dwarf,_ but he was pretty sure everyone on board except the laboratory mice could give him orders. He’d even fetched more cleaning alcohol for the mortuary mechanoid, and until someone died on the ship, all the thing did was keep the slabs polished.

His train of thought had been delayed at the wrong station again.

“…can’t wait until Lloth has her kittens!” gushed a voice, too mercurial and young to do anything as simple as _say_ a sentence. It was often endearing, and sometimes left Harper wondering why the fuck the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation would design their state-of-the-art shipboard computer personality to resemble an unusually perky cybergoth.

He looked up at the monitor screen where Katy’s face floated in a purplish void, the exact colour of her copious eyeshadow. The general effect was of someone with actual holes in her face. She had her quirks – the appearance, the frequent demands for pancakes she couldn’t eat, her prying into the personal lives of everyone on board, the fact she required one of the night shift to tuck a blanket around her databanks and tell her a bedtime story, and her obvious crush on the oblivious mortuary mechanoid – but Harper was very fond of her. She was one of the few good things in his increasingly shitty life.

Sometimes, however, he wished she would just get the point before he had to wrap it in black ribbon and label it ‘A Thoughtful and Expensive Present for Katy, Who is a Most Amazing and Powerful Supercomputer’.

“There… isn’t some kind of Space Corps Directive against bringing an unquarantined animal on board, is there?” Harper asked, in the slow and thoughtful tone of a conscientious man who had scruples about this very thing.

“Nope.” Katy beamed at him. Or maybe it was at the cat. “Don’t worry about it. Awwww, look at her wash her little face!”

Shit. “It’s just that I remember someone quoting Space Corps Directive-“ Harper looked down at a number he’d written on his wrist, “8445612. ‘Bringing an unquarantined animal on board carries a mandatory sentence of twelve months in stasis, with a further six months if you fail – if you – smeg!”

“ -if the offending party fails to surrender the animal upon discovery,” Katy added absently. “Additional: if the animal is a small yappy dog, both offending party and offensive animal will be spaced. If the animal is a fully trained circus elephant, the offending party gets a free drink for every minute he kept the bugger hidden, which he may choose to have before or after, but not during, his stasis sentence.”

“Yeah,” said Harper, immensely relieved. “That one. You see, I forgot to get Lloth vaccinated. Or quarantined. Or a permit or anything. She could be swarming in space germs for all I know.”

“Nonsense!” Katy giggled. “She’s too cute to be sick. So we’ll just forget all about sticking you in stasis.” She winked at him. She wasn’t very good at it, and for one moment Harper was worried half her face had glitched.

“But-“

“I SAID,” the computer boomed, “WE’LL FORGET ABOUT IT.” Then her face fell. Literally fell; her eyes were just visible above the bottom edge of the screen. “I really wish I had hands, you know.” She sniffed. “Then I could pet her – she looks so soft – and I could hug you, and I could…. I could shake Shay’s hand or something-“

“Oh, sweetheart.” Damn the computer. She was irresistible, and Harper turned his attention to cheering her up.

He’d just have to get his mandatory sentence another way.

He knew just the person.

* * *

Second Technician Khemuret Xul was an easy woman to find. If she wasn’t on-duty (and she wasn’t, because Harper wasn’t either), she was in her quarters, frantically studying for another exam. If she passed it – whichever it was - they’d have to make her an officer. Fortunately for the morale of the entire crew, she invariably failed.

It wasn’t her technical skills, which were serviceable. It wasn’t her knowledge base, which was formidable whether you quizzed her on navigation, engineering, medicine, tactics, or the correct wash temperature for uniform-issue sock suspenders. No, the main issue was that she was a tactless, racist snob with the personal charm of an unexpected cowpat in your chocolate smoothie. The mandatory Leadership Ethics portion of the exams had been something of a joke before she turned up on _Red Dwarf_ , with questions like:

“You find your rations are running low. Do you:

  1. a) divert to the nearest supply station, which will add 3 minutes to your 6-month delivery schedule
  2. b) render the lowest-ranked member of the crew down for soup stock



Justify your choice in an inspiring speech to your crew.”

It hadn’t changed, but it wasn’t a joke any more. Harper had seen one of her papers after a long and very athletic night with the invigilator, and Khem’s 750-word diatribe about the importance of schedules, the unimportance of lesser beings and the nutritional value of buttock fat was the only thing keeping her from command. It raised a number of even more disturbing questions when he realised that, as the only person she was technically superior to, it was his arse she’d suggested serving with croutons.

Harper patted it reassuringly – see, Khem, no buttock fat worth considering there – before knocking on her door.

“Yes?”

“It’s Harper. Got a moment?”

“I’m revising. Go away.”

“It’s urgent, and it will only be a moment, I promise.”

There was an unintelligible grumble, and the door slid open just wide enough for Khem to squeeze through it. She didn’t like people in her quarters, apparently convinced that they were using her study notes to cheat on their exams and sabotage hers.

Harper gave her his most winning smile, which had never yet produced more than an eyeroll in response. “I had to show you something.” He fished a picture of Lloth batting him cutely on the nose while Katy laughed in the background out of his pocket and shoved it under her nose. “Look, isn’t she adorable?”

Khem’s eyes narrowed. “You brought an unquarantined animal on board.”

Thank fuck. She was an anal-retentive ice-knickers who thought about people under her command like a sausage mincer thought about cows, pigs and the scrapings off the abattoir floor, but also like a sausage mincer, she was sharp. “Yeah?”

“You have it in your quarters.”

“Yeah?”

“You showed the ship’s computer.”

“Well, yeah. Katy’s a nice-“

“You took a _photo_.”

“Yeah.”

“And you showed it to your immediate supervisor.”

“Yeah. Don’t you think-“

“You said it was urgent.”

“It is!”

“When I am _busy_ _studying_ for a _very important exam_.”

“Uh, yeah.”

“That has to be the _stupidest_ thing I have _ever_ seen anyone do, and I was there when Flashfreeze Jim decided he felt like some ‘nice fresh air’ and went out without his spacesuit! You’re on report, Harper, for bringing an unquarantined animal on board and gross negligence of duty.”

 _Finally_ – “Wait, ‘gross neglect’? I’m not even on duty!”

“You’ve clearly donated your brain to science, who took one look at it and decided they didn’t have a microscope powerful enough to study something that small, then sent it back to you via the Mimas mail and the bottom of a gibbon’s cage. Crew without a brain cannot do their duty, therefore, gross negligence. Get the animal, we’re going to the captain.”

“No.”

It shouldn’t have been possible for Khem to narrow her eyes further, but she did. She narrowed them so far Harper wondered if she could actually still see. “You’re failing to surrender the animal?”

Being squinted at was not as intimidating as Khem appeared to think it was. And anyway, so far Plan B was working. “With that grasp of the obvious, you could be an officer one day.”

It was a low blow, but it hit. “ _You-“_ She cut herself off. “I’m going. Come if you wish, or just add ‘resisting arrest’ to bringing an unquarantined animal on board, refusing to surrender said animal, gross negligence of duty, insubordination _and_ insolence.”

* * *

Less than an hour later, Harper was walking into the stasis chamber. It was technically a punishment, being frozen in time for three years without pay, but it worked for him. In a blink of an eye he’d be back home, and maybe he could start to fix some of the problems he’d left behind him.

Katy would miss him, but she’d cope.

On the whole, really, the Plan had worked wonderfully well.

The stasis door sealed, and Harper winked at a security guard.

The stasis door unsealed, and Harper stepped back out into the grey corridors of _Red Dwarf._ The security guard was gone, and apparently nobody else had taken the time out of watching zero-G soccer to come welcome him back.

“Hello, Harper.” Katy’s voice was uncharacteristically subdued.

“Katy!” He stretched his arms out, as if to give her a hug. “How’s my favourite shipboard computer? Did you miss me?”

“So much!” She still didn’t sound right, though. “I got you out as soon as it was safe. Would you… would you come up to the drive room for debriefing?”

Harper made one of the obligatory jokes about debriefings. Katy didn’t laugh. On one hand, that was fair enough; all seven of the jokes were deader than dinosaurs in flared corduroy trousers. On the other… well, it wasn’t like her. Something was wrong, and it might have been just how quiet everything was.

“Katy, where is everyone?” he asked, as he passed through the exam room. On several desks were little heaps of white ash, like a coke addict’s dream; he stuck a finger in one and licked it. Okay, more like a coke addict’s nightmare.

“Uh, Harper… they’re dead.”

“What, everyone?”

“Everybody’s dead, Harper.”

The scope of it took some beating into his skull. Katy was almost sounding irritated by the time he reached the drive room. _Red Dwarf_ was a big ship, with a lot of personnel, and they were… all dead. Except him, who’d been safe in stasis…

“How? What happened?”

“One of the drive plates was poorly repaired,” Katy said. _Said,_ not _gushed,_ not _exclaimed,_ not even _mourned._ “It blew, and the whole crew received a lethal dose of cadmium-2 before I could seal the area.”

“Oh, _smeg._ ” Everybody was dead, and no wonder Katy sounded off, she must be blaming herself, poor computer… He crossed the drive room to her monitor, barely noticing the unidentified pile of ash he was standing in, and started patting her console consolingly. “Look, are you all right?”

“I don’t know,” Katy said, and then she began to cry. “It’s just – I’ve been so lonely, Harper, all by myself for three million years –“

“ _Three million years?!”_

“Well,” Katy sniffled, “I couldn’t let you out until the background radiation died down to a safe level, and, and, and I think I might have a gone a bit computer senile –“

Three fucking million fucking years. And fucking everyone was fucking dead.

Not just everyone on _Red Dwarf_ , but everyone at home too, and in some cases that would improve them, but he’d never see C- no. He dismissed the name, and the eyes, and the emotions and all the rest of it. Keep it for later and the ship’s supply of alcohol had better be intact because he was going to smegging drink it all. Right now there was a computer who needed him.

“You’re not senile, sweetheart. It’s okay. We’ll look after each other, we’re friends, and if it’s just the two of us, that’s all we need.”

“It’s not, though.”

“Not what?”

“Not just the two of us. Not technically.”

There was no sound of footsteps. There was no movement in the air. There wasn’t even a smell of hand sanitiser and uniform starch. There was just a voice behind him.

“Harper. Would you be so kind as to stop treading in my body?”

And, when he turned, there was a bald woman in her red Second Technician’s uniform, with a big grey ‘H’ on her forehead.

“Hello, Khem,” he said, stepping out of the pile of ash and wiping specks of her off his boots. “You’re a hologram?” Everyone on the ship had a hologram back-up program. Fucking _everyone_ , and Katy chose to bring back Khem?

“Yes,” Khem said, arms crossed. “Because I, like the rest of the crew, am dead. Well done. I hope that cat was worth killing the entire ship for.”

“Me?”

“Nu-uh!” Katy frowned at Khem. “You were the one who stuffed up repairing the drive plate!”

“Because Harper got himself imprisoned in stasis and was not _there_ to stop Faraldor Heartwood _talking_ to me while I was trying to repair the drive plate!”

“Oh, no.” It had been a long day already in the twenty minutes since he’d exited stasis, and he really didn’t have much patience for Khem at the best of times. “The one person on this whole ship who fancied you _talked_ to you. How terrible. No wonder you screwed up and _killed everyone_.”

Khem just glared at him.

He grinned back, with more teeth than good humour. “What’s it like, being a hologram?”

“I’ve only been online for five minutes,” she said, “and I feel fundamentally like myself, except- would you please stop waving your arm through my head?”

“Well, look at that. You’re physically untouchable. That must be such a relief for you.”

“Contrary to popular opinion –“

There had been shifts on end of this kind of thing, him trying to find one decent human emotion Khem would admit to feeling and her sniping at him, and while the normality was reassuring, it wasn’t much fun. “Katy, why Khem? Were all the other hologram discs broken?”

“N-no,” Katy said slowly, and then mumbled something that sounded an awful lot like ‘Shay’.

“Katy…”

The computer blushed. “Well, Shay was taken offline during the blast, and Khem donated her in the first place, so she’s the only one with the owner’s manual and the reactivation PIN…”

“Shay, is it?” Khem was staring at the computer now, with the expression of someone who’d just put two and two together and then seen the numbers start making kissy faces at each other. “Fine. I’ll repair and reactivate the mortuary mechanoid, and in exchange, you won’t replace me with another hologram.”

Smeg. He was going to be stuck with Khem for the rest of his life -

“You will?! I will! It’s a deal!”

\- and he couldn’t even be too mad about it because Katy was smiling and at least that was one thing positive in this whole bloody awful mess.

“Come on, Harper,” Khem said. “I have the requisite knowledge to fix Shay, but I’m going to need your hands.” She grimaced, as if realising just what she’d said. “Please wash them first.”

* * *

They had to pull a few parts out of storage to repair Shay – or, at least, Harper had to while Khem criticised everything. It was just like the old days, which were three million years ago but felt like about an hour. Eventually, however, they put a grey, blocky head on the black, blocky representation of a female body, and the droid sat up.

“Wow,” Shay said. “That was a bad one.”

“Shay!” Katy bubbled over with excitement. “I’m so glad you’re back, are you all right?”

“Fine,” the mechanoid said phlegmatically. “Am I on duty at last? Is there a body?”

“As a matter of fact,” Khem said, and it was a bit disconcerting to hear. She sounded gentler, almost human, when she talked to Shay. “There was a radiation accident three million years ago, and everyone except Harper is dead.”

“Huh.” Shay processed this. “That’s a lot of bodies. And nobody’s studied bodies three million years after death by radiation. Sounds interesting.” She got herself up to her feet, creaking slightly, and lurched over to the cabinet where the cleaning alcohol was kept, then emptied a bottle of it down her throat.

That explained why the mortuary went through so much cleaning alcohol and hand sanitiser. He’d always wondered.

“What an excellent idea,” Harper said. “Shay, why don’t you join me in the mess? I’m sure we can find something a bit better to drink than that stuff.”

“Fine by me,” she said.

Katy beamed, and Khem frowned – but her quarters lay beyond the mess, so all of them were walking together when they ran into the… creature.

They turned a corner, and there it was, posing at the junction of two corridors.

Take a male model, the kind who accessorises lithe muscles with body oil. Fling draperies at him, little diaphanous wisps of fabric or smoke that actively defy gravity and don’t hide a thing. Anchor them with impractical filigrees of silver jewellery, including numerous piercings and a codpiece glittering with rubies. Harper stared at those for a while, while the guy stared at him, and then started to pick up on the _other_ details. With all the skin on display, it was hard to ignore that humans don’t come in that perfect inky black. The ears were pointed, as were the teeth. The smooth mane of hair was dead white. The eyes were blood red. The fingers were clawed.

A drawing from an extremely niche magazine, and it – _he_ , definitely a he – was there in front of Harper, and he wasn’t human.

He hissed at them, sticking his arms above his head and spreading his claws, and the posture looked kind of familiar but it was hard to think through the sudden roar of hormones.

“Uh, hello?” Not his smoothest opening line, but it really had been a rough day.

The guy hissed again, then darted away. There was no sign of him in either corridor.

“Was I the only one who saw that?” Harper asked tentatively.

“No, I saw it,” Khem said, and Shay nodded. “Katy?”

“Well, you remember Lloth, right?” Katy piped up. “And you remember how she was going to have kittens? They were sealed down in the cargo hold during the radiation crisis, and they’ve been breeding down there for three million years. I guess the radiation sped things up a bit, because they evolved into the life form you just saw. _Felis sapiens_ , you know, descended from cats like humans descended from apes.”

Fuck, one more weird thing in this crappy day. He didn’t even know where to start, except with getting completely wasted.

* * *

Some things were true constants in the universe. You got blind drunk, you woke up with a hangover. Sometimes you woke up in bed with someone who looked like Donald Trump’s less-attractive grandparent, then staggered to the privy to throw up a vindaloo kebab and hope the memories never came back, but Harper was used to dealing with that.

On this occasion, he woke up with a hangover and a large orange traffic cone in his arms. That was not too bad. He staggered to the privy and threw up a mush that might’ve been pancakes. Peculiar, but not unprecedented either. Then the memories came back.

Fuck.

Harper washed his face, stared at the mirror until his hollow-eyed reflection started to look accusing, then stumbled back out into his quarters. The cat-man was on his bunk in an impossibly-flexible curl with one leg sticking up into the air, apparently sucking his own – no, he wasn’t although he clearly _could_ , he was just licking at the inside of his thigh between the leather straps.

“Uh.” Smeg, even worse than yesterday’s attempt, but he had a hangover and the guy was a cat and he had the most awkward half-boner now because surely it wasn’t right to want to fuck a cat, however well-evolved, but it had been a long three million years and _just look at him –_

The Cat looked up from washing himself, and grinned a wide, white, predatory grin. “Hello,” he purred, and there really was no other word for it. “Why don’t you make yourself useful and feed me some fish?”

“Uh, sure…?” Almost automatically, Harper punched up some trout a la crème from the dispenser.

As the machine whirred away, the Cat slid gracefully off the table and started wandering around the cabin. A little bottle appeared in his hand – from where, Harper wasn’t sure and wasn’t asking – and he sprayed things with it as he went. The desk. “This is mine.” The pillow. “Mine.” Katy’s monitor screen. “Mine now.”

He approached the laundry basket, then hesitated. “No,” he said, voice dripping with disgust. “That you can keep.” But the locker? “Mine.” And the dispenser? “Definitely mine.” He halted in front of Harper as the dispenser dinged, his ruby eyes locking with Harper’s.

Then he sprayed Harper right in the face. “You’re mine too.”

The smell was awful. “Oh, am I?” Harper said dryly. “Always nice to be claimed by an alien creature that’s sprayed cheap cologne all over my belongings. Really makes my day.”

“And so it should,” the Cat said, seating himself at the table. “Now be good and give me my fish.”

Harper plunked the plate down with an exaggerated bow, although the Cat didn’t seem to notice the mockery as he stuck his face into the dish.

He was alone on _Red Dwarf_ with Katy the ship’s computer, Khem the hologram, Shay the mortuary mechanoid, and a guy who had descended from a cat by way of some radiation and three million years of evolution. Everyone was dead.

Today was the first day of the rest of his life, and he’d never known what to do with that before shit got this weird.

At least it wasn’t going to be boring…?

  



End file.
